It’s a bleak time in education policy.
The writer Freddie deBoer makes one really important point about the ed reform movement: We have overpromised and underdelivered because we ignore the obvious truth that some kids are smarter than others. Where he’s wrong is in thinking that this one good point makes the whole reform enterprise a waste of time.
The latest Nation’s Report Card dashed hopes that U.S. students might have finally closed pandemic learning gaps. The results show reading scores are down nationally in both fourth and eighth grade, compounding declines on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP.
The pandemic gave the country a chance to rethink how states and school districts deliver quality education.
Editor’s note: A different version of this essay was first published by The 74.
When my middle child was in high school, nothing I said or did could keep him from dropping out. But what if I’d tried paying him?
During a January 29 town hall in Washington to discuss dismal new test results, Harvard professor Marty West—who serves as the vice chair of the board that oversees na
Academic skills alone are not enough for students to find success later in life, whether in their career specifically or in their broader participation in s
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Charles Baron
Oregon professor Siegfried Engelmann wasn’t your typical education guru. He didn’t peddle feel-good platitudes or promote classroom fads—he treated teaching like a hard science, and he built Direct Instruction (DI) to prove it.
Earlier this month, the U.S.
Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) is a widely-known experiment comparing class-size reduction and student achievement outcomes, conducted in the 1980s in Tennessee.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jing
Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report, one of the better education journalists working today, recently raised concerns about the empirical support for knowledge-rich curricula in improving reading comprehension. But the issue is not a lack of compelling evidence—there is prodigious evidence—but rather the difficulty of isolating long-term curricular effects in research.
Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released on January 29. How were they?
A valuable recent edition of the Journal of School Choice focused entirely on research around homeschooling, aiming to add useful data and rigorous analysis to this little-studied education sector.
Our latest study pilots a new measure of a school’s quality: its contribution to students’ grade point averages at their next school. It sends a clear message to educators that one of their core missions is to help their graduates succeed in their next step—not just in reading and math, but in all subjects—and not just on tests, but on the stuff that tests struggle to capture.
A new report from the Collaborative for Student Success aims to refocus attention on the “honesty gap” in the wake of the latest (and disastrous) NAEP results.
When I started teaching in Louisiana in 2004, I was told that the state was expanding annual assessments of students to all grades 3–8 because Louisiana ranked forty-ninth in the country for reading proficiency. I started to hear a gutting phrase that I’ve since learned is common across the southeast, “the only state behind us is Mississippi. Thank goodness for Mississippi.”
The third iteration of the Education Recovery Scorecard, compiled by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, was released hot on the heels of 2024 NAEP test scores and is an
The gender gap in education is less talked about than many other achievement gaps, but it persists.
A special issue of the Journal of School Choice is now out, focusing entirely on homeschooling research. It includes 16 studies from 23 authors at more than a dozen institutions. Hard data on homeschooling has long been scarce, so this issue is worthy of attention.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Brian Kisida, Associate Professor at
Though President Trump’s new executive order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” contains many elements that resonate with me philosophically and educationally, I’m having trouble reconciling it with the longstanding statutory prohibition on Uncle Sam mucking with
The data are out, and as everybody now knows—and as Mike Petrilli foresaw—they’re pretty grim. Here’s the short version, straight from the National Center for Education Statistics:
From its founding, the lodestone of the Knowledge Matters Campaign has been evidence-based, content-rich English language arts (ELA) curricula. A possible unintended consequence of the success of this movement has been reduced instruction in science and social studies.
Ignite Reading is one of many tutoring interventions unleashed upon America’s schools to try to mitigate learning loss experienced by students in the wake of pandemic-era school closures.
Despite working longer hours and experiencing higher levels of stress
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Daly, CEO of EdNavigator, joins Mike and David to discuss w
Editor’s note: This piece was also published on the author’s new Substack, The Next 30 Years.
